Software process improvement (SPI) today is based mainly on a perception of software processes as artifacts and this perception has led SPI efforts to focus on perfecting such artifacts as a means to improve the practices of the people supposed to execute these software processes. Such SPI efforts thus tend to view the design of software processes as separate from their use. In this approach pr...

For many small software companies, full-scale software process improvement (SPI) initiatives are often out of reach due to prohibitive costs and lack of SPI knowledge. However, to compete in the global market, software developers must improve their productivity, time to market and customer satisfaction. As part of an Australian National Industry Improvement Program, Software Engineering Austral...

Traditionally, SPI has been approached from a problem-oriented perspective commonly using models such as the IDEAL and the DMAIC. In contrast, appreciative inquiry is a strength-based approach focusing on bringing forward the best in people and organizations to achieve successful change. While there is significant research on SPI initiatives and the use of problem-oriented approaches there is l...

Information has become the key to our lives. As a consequence, information technology is and will be the most important success factor of modern industry and commerce and will rapidly change both our society and our individual lives. This means that software, as the essentially singular base for information processing will receive ever-increasing attention and importance. But despite all the de...

Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer the que...

Thanks in no small measure to the work of groups such as IFIP WG 2.3 and its members based on earlier work in areas such as high level programming languages, major progress have been achieved in programming methodology and methods [gri78]. In particular, it led to major advances in computer science and to the increasing use of formal methods in software development. This, in turn, was applied t...

....................................................................................................................... i Preface........................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... v

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a structured representation of software development processes that can support an organisation’s software process improvement (SPI) strategies. However, CMMI and SPI initiatives generally exhibit low levels of adoption and limited success. One of the major reasons for these shortcomings is that many organisations undertake SPI initiatives with...

Surviving in the increasingly competitive software business requires more than hiring smart, knowledgeable engineers and buying the latest development tools. You also need to use effective software development processes, so those smart engineers can systematically use the best technical and managerial practices to successfully complete their projects. More organizations are looking at software ...

In order to prepare students for careers as software process engineers, software engineering education needs to adopt innovative instructional designs to support effectively the learning of required knowledge and skills. In this paper, we propose a cross-course design for teaching software process improvement and assessment in a graduate course in combination with an undergraduate capstone proj...